Radio review

The Lamplighter (Radio 3) was epic. Huge, sprawling, ambitious, defiant, angry and gripping, Jackie Kay's dramatised poem told the bitter story of slavery through the experience of four women. It began, and pointedly ended, with the voice of an 11-year-old girl, snatched from her home to be sold after a long sea voyage to Britain: "I am a girl, I am in the dark, I don't know how long I have been kept in the dark."

This was dramatically towering stuff, full of rousing prayer and sad song, and choruses sung in helplessness and revolt, as Kay's women defied cruelty, death and silence. The superb Mona Hammond played Mary, a woman who defended herself from rape and was then punished with torture and death: left out to die for three days, she says, "to break the spirit of anyone whose spirit might need breaking". This highly charged production, full of true stories that have been left unheard too long, had quite the opposite effect. Its circular structure ended brimful of hope, with Mary merrily cackling to herself, "I survived them all."